OmniROM

It's been a while since we've last heard from OmniROM but the rather ambitious project hasn't exactly gone silently into the night. The open source project is still alive and kicking even if it doesn't try to grab the spotlight like CyanogenMod and Paranoid Android often do. For this round, the team is shedding some light on their Android 5.0 activities and sadly, it's not all good news. The good news is, of course, that there is enough progress to soon have nightlies for supported devices.

We’ve talked about OmniROM a number of times already here at Android Community. This was a project started a few years back in the wake of the CyanogenMod ROM project going commercial, and the response to the project has been very warm, with a number of famous developers getting on with the program. There were questions on how fast they were going to be able to put out a Lollipop-flavored ROM, and seeing as they were able to boot a device recently under Android 5.0, it shouldn’t take long.

We were thinking that it might take a while for the independent ROM developers to get at Android 5.0 Lollipop and integrate it into their builds – mainly because a lot of people would probably want to explore and enjoy pure vanilla Android Lollipop first. But lo and behold, the OmniROM project has become the first to integrate Android 5.0 to their build and have a device boot up OmniROM with a Lollipop flavor.

Our phonebook lists have probably grown so long that the only way to tame these wild beasts would be to corral them into groups. While Android's People contacts app does have that capability, it is limited only to Google's proprietary syncing service or Microsoft Exchange. Ever an advocate of open source solutions, OmniROM has introduced a patch that opens the doors for other external syncing services to get the same functionality.

At the height of the Android 4.4.3 release frenzy, OmniROM made an important announcement. It has kicked off nightly builds of supported devices that includes the latest Android version, thereby showing that the project is still pretty much alive and kicking.

OmniROM may yet have another unique feature under its belt. With an upcoming custom hotwords feature, users can set any phrase they want to start almost any app right from the homescreen using just their voice.

It seems that the Find 7a will be quite the darling of tinkerers and modders. After receiving a way to install OnePlus' CyanogenMod 11S version, the smartphone is now receiving the start of what will hopefully be more stable builds of the rather young OmniROM.

Whenever you see a delicious new feature in another manufacturer's Android, more often than not you're simply left drooling and hopeless. Luckily for those who have been taken by OmniROM's pumped up task switcher slash app dock OmniSwitch, that is not the case.

Proving that miracles still sometimes happen, the almost legendary Samsung Galaxy S II has just been added to CyanogenMod 11's roster of nightly builds. While it's still a bit too early to get hopes up, it still brings an early taste of Android 4.4 for a device that would have probably never seen it otherwise.

Ever since its incarnation, one of Android's crowning achievements is its ability to multitask or have multiple apps truly running at the same time. While Android does have a built-in way to switch between those apps, OmniROM believes it can do even better and has thus started work on OmniSwitch.